‘The End of the Tour’ Trailer: Go Road Tripping With Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg

In 1996, Rolling Stone sent journalist and author David Lipsky to travel with David Foster Wallace for the end of his book tour publicizing his great novel Infinite Jest. Lipsky and Wallace spent five days traveling together, and the transcripts of their conversations eventually became the basis of Lipsky’s book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Now the book is a movie called The End of the Tour. After a debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie was acquired by distributor A24, who’s releasing it later this summer.

If you don’t know Wallace or his work, then the appeal here is the cast: Jason Segel as the Infinite Jest author and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky. (The film also stars Ron Livingston, Joan Cusack, and Anna Chlumsky.) The End of the Tour was directed by James Ponsoldt, the talented young filmmaker behind popular indies like Smashed and The Spectacular Now. Though Wallace’s estate has not endorsed the film, and even went so far as to release a statement claiming he “would never have agreed that [the] saved transcripts [from his interviews with Lipsky] could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie,” The End of the Tour was generally very well-received at Sundance. Critics praised the movie’s look at artists and their audience, and were almost universally impressed with Segel’s performance as the late author.

Authorized or not, The End of the Tour opens on July 31. If you want to read Infinite Jest before it opens, you better get started; the thing’s over 1,000 pages long.